Salt Hill 33

Yes, it's true: we have survived another winter here in Syracuse, NY. In his interview with us, J. Robert Lennon says that Upstate New York is "a wonderful landscape for people to lose their minds in." He's right: we have lost ourselves among the snowfalls and the icy streets, in the land where water stays frozen most of the year. But now, with the melting snow and the reappearance of the sun, our lost minds turn to the end of our time with Salt Hill. Our lives outside of this publication are moving into a spring of their own, pointing us towards life away from our Syracuse community, away from the place where we've become the people we've always wanted to be. "When you have a place that welcomes all parts of you," Seth E. Davis reminds us in "High Top Reflections," "it becomes hard to avoid it."

Our last issue with Salt Hill is one of unique shapes. It's the issue that features Chloë Feldman Emison's dead purchasing and using the goods of the living; Kallie Falandays' Body-shaped Houses\House-shaped Bodies; Jeff Parker's roosters: the first angry, the second a drunk. In this issue, Matt Bell tells us that "All our sticky knowledge. / All our ambitions and insights / and deadly, deathly skill. / [are] All useless if what we want / is to last."

There is so much to say: "Everything is so full right now / & I am running out of containers / to put things in," Russ Woods tells us, and we believe him. We believe him because we are his words. We know how he feels. We are tired and excited, we are grateful, and like Alicia Catt we must confess: "yes and yes and yes." Thank you for coming on this journey with us. Our time with Salt Hill has now dropped its textured curtains, but we leave you in the best of hands. We are every hopeful that Elizabeth Lyons speaks the truth when she discloses, "there's another way to be born."

Much like Tyler McAndrew's narrator in "Together and Alone and Separate from Everything Else," we don't know what the story is that we're trying to tell. But we hope you enjoy this issue and read it as if you are Matt Bell's gods--that you learn from what you devour.